


Free Will

by Paraprosdokia (ChangeableConsistency)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dean Feels, Gen, Heartache, Hurt Dean Winchester, Suicide, Time Loops- Sort Of, Will Dean Ever Get His Happy Ending, not THIS time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-08
Updated: 2019-12-08
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:41:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21722404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChangeableConsistency/pseuds/Paraprosdokia
Summary: You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice.If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill;I will choose a path that's clear-I will choose Free Will.(Rush)
Kudos: 4





	Free Will

**Author's Note:**

> Written around Season 5, finally decided to clean it up and post it.

Dean is the boy who stays; his loyalty burns like the edge of a knife.

Sam always leaves; his absence a wound that festers and bleeds, poisoning everything around it; destroying himself each time he tries to fight it, destroying others when he gives in.

Alpha and omega, the wheel spins without ceasing.

Apart, they cannot escape each other; drawn together over and over again, a looped recording repeating the same score. 

Brought whole once more, they cannot escape their destiny.

Then, impossibly, the record skips; pounding hearts stuttered in a fractured arrhythmia. The cycle is broken. 

This isn’t that story. 

The pattern has changed before, as these things do. Usually, John survives to raise the boys on a mad diet of revenge and sorrow. 

Sometimes both John and Mary are taken by fire; Dean left to watch as the flames consume their parents, Sam eerily silent in his arms even as the sirens come screaming down the street.

The cycles where Mary survives instead of John are somehow worse. Sometimes she is strong enough to do what she knows must be done; taking the life of her infant son, Azazel's blood shining on his lips as they turn blue. These are always the shortest turns, invariably the horror of her choices overwhelms her and she takes her own life, usually sooner than later. When Dean is lucky, it's sooner and she frees him too, before she has a chance to teach him the life she had walked away from more than a decade earlier.

The rare moments between each ending and beginning, when Dean can see it all- every terrible cycle stretching through infinity, he knows that there is a thing more harrowing than the hell he experiences in the more common turns when he descends into the Pit, holding onto himself as long as he can until in a moment of weakness he breaks, the fragile shell of his will crumbling around him to release the monster he hides deep within his soul.

...No, excruciating as those are, the lives where everyone abandons him leave more scars on his psyche than anything that goes before or after.

He counts himself lucky that it is the rarest pattern of all; Azazel poisoning Sam (this never changes), his father powerless as he is pinned to the ceiling, blood staining his shirt as the flames consume him. Mary, Dean held securely in her arms, arriving just in time to see John reach out to her before the flames swallow him whole. She sets Dean down long enough to lean into the crib and he, with a four year old's trust of his perfect shining mother, holds on to her leg expecting her to lift Sammy out so that they can run from the fire. As flames lick down the walls his mother lets out a choked sob and plucks him from the ground; leaving Sammy, head twisted to an unnatural angle, in the crib.

"Mama?" he asks, swallowing a whimper, trying to be brave for her, brave like his daddy, who shouted from the ceiling for them to save themselves even as the fire poured over him, "Mommy, what about Sammy?"

"Sam's gone, baby." 

She walks down the stairs, cradling him in her arms, her tear stained cheek pressing to the top of his head.

She sets him on the couch and she opens the cabinet with the special dishes, the ones he's never allowed to play with; the room is getting hotter and smoke is starting to creep down the stairs.

Then he is in her arms again, resting against her hip as she calmly walks out the door, flames chasing them as they leave. Dean looks back several times. Mary never does.

He grows up fast, and he grows up hard, learning how to kill when most kids his age are learning how to write. Unlike John, Mary grew up in the life and knows how far she can push him, how much he can take without breaking. She strips away her baby boy leaving only a hunter.

He gets his first kill before his next birthday, something slimy with tentacles crawling out from under a hotel bed somewhere in upstate Maine, the sharpened silver butter knife sinking into rubbery flesh until he finds the monster's weak spot with more luck than skill; the monster explodes, green and black goo coating the already grimy carpet and walls.

His mom is proud of him and gives him one of her rare smiles, and his own custom dagger. He still keeps the butter knife. Your first love is always hard to let go.

The few times he is in school his grades are atrocious, except in penmanship and PE. He doesn't tell the teachers how important it is to get Enochian just right, a line not dotted or a circle not crossed making the difference between trapping a monster or getting your face eaten by one.

He learned that sometimes it's better to run and find more favorable ground and that running doesn't make you a coward. It makes you a survivor.

He's in his teens, on his own (Mary never survives to see his sixteenth birthday and she’s the only one he ever really trusted to have his back) when he meets his first angel.

He is, justifiably, suspicious.

Castiel. The angel who falls without falling; not yet out of Heaven's grace and never out of his Father's. Sometimes it's something Dean can relate to all too well (though not this time, in this most terrible of cycles).

He's just finished taking out a nest of lady cricket monsters (and it is so not cool when sexy ladies turn into bugs) when the abandoned barn starts to rattle and creak. The few electric lights that had been set up pop in a shower of sparks. 

"I am here to guide and protect you."

"Thanks, Stranger Danger, but I can take care of myself."

"You are the Sword of Michael, chosen to be wielded against Lucifer in the coming Apocalypse."

"I'm the what for the what now?" 

“Michael’s most perfect vessel, born to defeat the Devil and bring peace on Earth. You’re going to save the world, Dean.”

If Mom had stressed one lesson more than any other it was that any deal that looked too good to be true definitely was.

“Vessel?”

“Yes. When the time is right, Michael will come to you and you will invite him in.”

“Fuck off, Feathers. I’m not interested in being anyone’s meat puppet.”

“You aren’t interested in saving humanity? Isn’t that what you try to do every day?”

“It’s what I almost die doing every day and if you hadn’t noticed, there’s no shortage of monsters. So let me do that; it’s what I’m good at. You put me in charge of winning the Apocalypse and that’ll end bad for everyone.”

"Good things do happen, Dean."

"Not in my experience."

“As Michael’s vessel you will be impervious to any pain except that done by Lucifer and without his own perfect vessel you alone are guaranteed to survive.”

Dean scoffs, “Pass.”

“You don't think you deserve to be saved?”

“Why me? It isn’t God’s Mercy. I know he has none.”

“Because God commanded it. Because you were born to it. Because with your family—.”

“Don’t talk about my family,” Dean growls. 

None of it matters. It’s all true but none of it is real. 

In the end, it’s not so bad, being possessed by an angel. It means ringside seats for the End of the World and he feels his own triumph sing next to Michael’s as the blade sinks into Lucifer’s heart and the Devil dies with a flash of lightning that shakes the Earth. 

They spend the next century remaking the world into the paradise it was always meant to be, or so Dean thinks. 

It all falls apart when Michael resurrects Lucifer. It’s blind pride that drives them to do it; God is just as absent as ever and their brother is the only one with the capacity to truly appreciate them— their work. 

They— no, he remembers now, he isn’t an angel, he’s just human along for the ride— Michael doesn’t raise Lucifer with the same vessel as the one he wore in the Great Battle. The first time around Lucifer was in the body of a woman, a pale, petite brunette who had fought like— well, like the Devil. 

This time Lucifer is wearing a giant of a man and unlike Dean, unlike the woman, he fight’s Lucifer’s possession. Dean can see it in the strain of his somehow familiar face, the way his movement will suddenly jerk in an unintended direction, and in the occasional flare of determined anger in his eyes. 

Dean asks Michael in their head.

“Well, now,” Michael answers out loud, the cultured polish of Dean’s voice both alien and familiar to his ears, “It’s only fair that I give my brother his perfect vessel, seeing as you’ve served me so well.”

But Dean can see that it has nothing to do with fair. It’s not a gift but a punishment; a different type of cage for his fallen brother. As long as Lucifer has to fight his vessel, he won’t be able to fight Michael. 

Lucifer looks them in the eye and Dean knows it’s the vessel, the man speaking when he says, “You have to fight him.”

At first Dean thinks he means for Michael to fight Lucifer; but no, he means Dean should fight Michael, but why would he do that. 

Lucifer cocks his head to the side like he’s listening to someone and then says, “Fine, I’ll show him if that will get you to calm the hell down.”

Lucifer lunges at Michael who avoids the blow with ease, but it’s a feint as Lucifer’s real goal is to touch Dean’s forehead and Command, “See.”

Suddenly they aren’t in a garden paradise with mosaic pathways and pillars twined with vines; the pillars are giant spikes poking up through a blasted and deserted landscape.

“What the hell?”

“Michael’s been lying to you, Dean. Give me a chance to make this right. Cast him out and together we can rebuild the world.”

Well, this is a garbage bag full of suck.

“Get out!” Dean roars, and it’s strange, so strange to here is own words in his voice, “Get out you son of a bitch.”

Michael flinches and in that moment Lucifer strikes, taking Michael’s blade from him and plunging it into Dean’s chest and his world is on fire as the ground shakes and he’s electrocuted from the inside. 

He comes to a second later, lying on the ground bleeding out, just in time to hear Lucifer say, “Give up, Sam.”

“Sam?” Dean whispers through blood flecked lips.

The vessel— Sam! Sammy. His brother. Dean can see Dad in the curve of his chin, Mom in the shape of his eyes, and the way he’s gritting his teeth as he brings the blade to his throat is pure Winchester.

“Sammy, no. Don’t. Fuck!,” Dean coughs up more blood and his vision starts to go dark, “Please?”

“Dean,” Sam says, a lifetime packed into that one word, and then he pushes the blade in, killing Lucifer with the now familiar holy theatrics. 

Killing himself in the process. 

Sam’s body falls next to Dean with his arm stretched out and with his last ounce of strength Dean reaches over to grab Sam’s hand. 

In a pool of blood from a brother he never knew, Dean dies. 

In the eternity between lives that lasts no longer than a breath, Dean vows, “No more,” that the next cycle will be the last, that he and Sam will stop the Apocalypse and his brother will stay and Dean will live. 

And the record skips.


End file.
